Mo Salah contract extension marks the final end of last season, for Liverpool

Mo Salah has signed his contract extension with Liverpool, the final piece of a small jigsaw that fixes a hint of end of season malaise…

So after all that fuss and flustering, the deal is done. Mo Salah has signed a new three-year contract with Liverpool which will make him their highest-ever paid player, and everybody seems to be happy apart from those who’d been hoping amongst hopes that Salah might defect from Liverpool to Barcelona and, well, perhaps give everybody else in the Premier League a chance, as well.

Instead, opposing defences will have to gear up for another season of seeking to face down a striker who has based his entire career on boiling his talents down to their rarest and most unstoppable forms. The turn of pace, the eye for a through-ball, the glacially-calm finishing. They’re not going anywhere. Well, not until the ageing process finally catches up with him, anyway.

For all the tension created by the sheer length of these ongoing negotiations, it seldom felt as though there was much truly serious competition for Salah’s services. Much has always been made of his childhood support for Barcelona, but the Blaugrana of today is hardly the Blaugrana of Salah’s childhood and adolescence.

Everybody knows that in 2022 Barcelona remain some distance from the team that will have fed Salah’s imagination as a teenager. He was 16 when they won the Champions League in 2009 and 18 two years later when they repeated it so stylishly – impressionable ages both, and it’s hardly surprising that the young Salah, considering his options from the football-mad city of Cairo, would have dreamed of joining what may now remembered as two of Barca’s very greatest teams.

But while this temptation, combined with a desire to maximise his income for what may turn out to be the last contract of the prime years of his playing career, may have ended up dragging the signing of a new contract out for several months, it never really felt as though Salah would actually go to Barcelona, this time around. Attempts to drum up hysteria on the subject never felt wholly convincing.

Barcelona are simply not the club they were, having buckled so heavily under the weight of living beyond their financial means for several years. The club’s sense of self-importance hasn’t gone anywhere. They still talk of the European Super League as though the manifest destiny of European club football should be for the entire game to kowtow to their greatness, even…